NBC allowed a false claim about comments made by President Donald Trump to go uncorrected for two full days.
On Friday, the media outlet tweeted that Trump called Confederate General Robert E. Lee “incredible” and included an edited clip of Trump saying Lee “was a great general.”
Except, as The Daily Wire previously reported, Trump was not praising Lee out of the blue (despite constant media claims that Trump is a white supremacist), and he never called Lee “incredible.”
Trump was actually talking about what an effective general Lee was (which is undisputed by historians) and how difficult it would be to defeat him. And Union General Ulysses S. Grant was not viewed as a great general but he ended up beating Lee anyway. Trump’s point was that someone who is flawed (as Grant was with his drinking problem) can defeat someone with all the right credentials.
It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that NBC issued a corrected tweet with Trump’s full remarks, admitting the president never called Lee “incredible.”
The original tweet is still up. Yes, it’s good that they finally corrected themselves, but if they hadn’t been in such a rush to attack Trump, they wouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place. They had to clip that video to get the desired narrative, which shows intent.
If there’s some solace in this, it’s that the corrected tweet – in a rare instance – is getting more retweets than the original, incorrect tweet.